The N.F.L.’s Bounty Game

On Friday, the National Football League disclosed some of the results of its self-directed investigation of “bounty” payments made to players on the New Orleans Saints. Some of the payments, the N.F.L. said, were handed out to Saints players as rewards for “inflicting injuries on opposing players that would result in them being removed from a game.”

How serious is this? Some clues are available in the statistics the N.F.L. published about its investigation. The investigators, led by a former police commissioner named Jeffrey Miller, who serves as the N.F.L.’s vice-president of security, reviewed “approximately eighteen thousand documents totaling more than fifty thousand pages,” interviewed a “wide range of individuals,” and even turned to “outside forensic experts to verify the authenticity of key documents.”

What sort of locker-room bonus system for players generates fifty thousand pages of relevant documents, including some so critical to fact-finding that they need to be examined by forensic specialists? What kinds of documents were uncovered? How were the payments described by the N.F.L. administered? Coaches and players, in their earlier reactions, have often tried to paint the bonus pools used by the Saints (and perhaps other teams) as informal, routine, often funded by fines levied against players for being late to meetings, and so on—nothing especially serious or systematic, just a series of side bets. Were the bonuses for injuring and knocking out an opposing quarterback thumbed out after a game in cash from some safe kept by Gregg Williams, the former Saints defensive coördinator who oversaw the Saints’ system? If not, were the payments so organized that they were ticketed up and added to paychecks, with taxes deducted?

The N.F.L. lacks the credibility and the motivation to fully expose whatever dark ecosystem we have just stumbled upon. The investigation summary released on Friday afternoon—a time zone well known as the media graveyard for press releases, one favored by strategic communications consultants of a certain unembarrassed type—is the equivalent of the general counsel at Goldman Sachs or Bank of America disclosing a few problems on the bank’s mortgage trading floor. A self-policing investigator has an interest in cleaning up the mess in a way that minimizes liability.

It seems a safe bet that whatever ugliness was practiced under Williams will not be the last of its kind to be discovered. The Williams bonus system, as described by the N.F.L., sounds on its face like a racketeering conspiracy to commit felony assault and battery in order to advance a shared business interest—the bonuses and increased salaries that are shared by N.F.L. players when they win championships, including the Super Bowl, which the Saints won in 2009. (The team’s owner, Tom Benson, says that he had asked Mickey Loomis, the general manager, to discontinue any bounty system there might be, but that it continued; the N.F.L. said that Benson coöperated with the investigation.) If the Saints players thought the “kill shot” bonuses overseen by Williams helped them win games, they were probably not the only players in the League who did. A conspiracy of this type would be prosecuted with jail time by most city attorneys if the offenders were pool-hall thugs targeting, say, tourists who came by to drink beer and rack up eight ball.

It also seems safe to assume that the N.F.L. will manage its own further investigations as it did on Friday: Pre-packaging statements of regret and apologies from offenders such as Williams, while shying away from saying that the team’s owner was complicit; selecting out shards of information for public release; offering transparency and decisive action, but tightly controlling the actual information flow.

It is easy to understand the League’s self-protecting instincts. The N.F.L. has been named as a defendant in more than a dozen civil lawsuits filed by former players who are seeking damages on the grounds that the League did not do enough to protect them from concussions and other debilitating injuries. These findings will provide a new dimension to the claims of the players who are suing. Imagine going to work in a factory every day where it turns out the manufacturing team across the floor, in order to make its productivity bonus, is paying the guy who runs the factory equipment to deliberately mangle your team’s hands—and that management knows what is going on.

The N.F.L. is a multi-billion dollar workplace. Its injured former employees and their lawyers are going to sort out the League’s liability and complicity, even if criminal prosecutors blanche because grand-jury investigations might be unpopular.

Gregg Williams, the Washington Post’s sports columnist Mike Wise wrote this morning, is a man of “remarkable hubris” who “thought more of himself than others thought of him and believed deeply that the force of his own personality could trump all the black marks and bad-character references against him.” (Williams was the defensive coördinator for the Redskins before he moved to New Orleans; the Post quoted four former players, including Philip Daniels, as saying that he ran a similar bounty system there. The paper also quoted Hall of Fame coach Joe Gibbs as saying that he did not know of such practices and would never have approved of them.) People with the sense of impunity that Wise attributes to Williams are, in any event, the kind of people who usually stand at the center of a mess like this one. Yet we already know that more than two dozen Saints players, the general manager, and the head coach knew what Williams was doing. It does not get much more systematic than that.

Yes, the N.F.L.’s extraordinarily successful corporate model is based upon aggression and controlled violence. And yes, once you enter into such territory, it is not always obvious where the borders are. Fans, amateur players, enthusiasts, television audiences, and ticket buyers are all complicit in the contextual value system here. As a boy playing Pop Warner football, I remember what we used to chant on defense when the opposing offense came to the ball: “Kill! Crush! Destroy! Hey hey!” Seriously. The coaches taught us these chants as motivation. So yes, we knock it around out there on the field, and it is not a beautiful game, only a thrilling one. Feeding Christians to lions probably seemed thrilling in its day, too.

The N.F.L. is evolving toward the only form that has a chance to survive as billion-dollar, legal, liability lawsuit-free televised entertainment for another century—as a fast, acrobatic, spread-out passing game with fewer full-speed hits and much more athleticism. As this year’s Pro Bowl game—a dull farce of up-and-down the field passing with no intensity or hitting at all—showed, neither the N.F.L.’s overseers nor its players has quite figured out how to make a passing-driven version of the game work without at least some controlled violence. It may be impossible for the League to solve this dilemma on its own. In any event, any business that evolves a workplace culture where dozens of people from top to bottom collectively lose sight of the difference between fair competition and corruption deserves to fail.

Photograph: Michael Zagaris/Getty

Steve Coll, a staff writer, is the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, and reports on issues of intelligence and national security in the United States and abroad.